SQSH WAVEfmt- old audio format

DrMerlin · Post by **DrMerlin** » Fri Jan 09, 2015 7:57 pm

I freelance with a game company thinking about doing an HD remake of one of their late 90s games.

They don't have the original sound effects, and we're having a hard time extracting them from the game itself. Each sound clip is stored in a file along with some metadata- subtitles and maybe more.

When you hexedit the sound file, you see that it is a "SQSH WAVEfmt"file. Nothing I have found can play it. It has a standard WAVEfmt section (excepting the RIFF/SQSH difference in the first couple of bytes) followed by a data block. I'm guessing at this point that the whole file is not SQSH encrypted. But that the data section of the wav format it.

The bottom of the file clearly shows strings containing the subtitles, so it's more than just the wav data, and the data at the bottom of the file, like at the top, is definitely not encrypted or compressed in anyway.

Has anyone come across anything like this?

Licensed technology for sound includes:
Sound Operating System Human Machine Interfaces Inc
3D Sound Software Intel Corporation
Uses for Video Smacker Video Technology by RAD
and Audio compression Game Tools Inc

But tribal knowledge at the studio is that it was a custom job inhouse, for which the source code and source talent is long gone.

Hoping someone here can help
Thanks,
DrMerlin

DrMcCoy · Post by **DrMcCoy** » Sat Jan 10, 2015 1:22 am

Well, I for one haven't seen something like that.

If it really was an inhouse job, I suppose you won't get around RE'ing the original executable. "SQSH" or a 32-bit integer representation thereof should be easy to find if you're lucky and it gets compared directly, not byte-wise. Starting from there, you might be able to relativly quickly find out how the sounds are stored.

DrMerlin · Post by **DrMerlin** » Mon Jan 12, 2015 5:13 pm

That's a good idea- why haven't we thought of it?